laddering
laddering is the present participle and gerund of ladder.
Noun
laddering (countable and uncountable, plural ladderings)
- A process of soil compaction that serves to break up clods and level a field.
- ploughings and ladderings
- An interview technique developed in the 1960s in which the interviewer systematically drills down for greater detail at each step.
- With upward laddering like this, you're going from the bottom of the hierarchy up towards the top, and what you'll typically find is that as you go up the number of branches decreases, so you'll keep hitting the same responses and the same high level goals and values eventually, more or less...2006, Rugg, Gordon, Petre, & Marian, A Gentle Guide To Research Methods, →ISBN, page 127
- An investment strategy where the investment is spread over multiple bonds or term deposits with rolling maturity dates.
- A regular pattern of oligonucleotide sizes on electrophoretic gels, resulting from the fragmentation of DNA strands during cell death.
- For example, tobacco cell cultures grown at 5oC, resulted in a loss of viability relative to control cells and exhibited DNA laddering (Koukalova et al., 1997).2006, Mohamed Al-Rubeai, Martin Fussenegger, Cell Engineering: Apoptosis, →ISBN, page 116
- An irregular fracture pattern that arises from uneven drying.
Meaning of ladder
Verb
ladder (third-person singular simple present ladders, present participle laddering, simple past and past participle laddered)
- To arrange or form into a shape of a ladder.
- And employing the innate gift for mimicry he'd always had – a gift which had made his father roar with laughter even when he was tired and feeling down – Jack 'did' Morgan Sloat. Age fell into his face as he laddered his brow the way Uncle Morgan's brow laddered into lines when he was pissed off...1984, Stephen King, Peter Straub, The Talisman, New York, N.Y.: Viking Press/G. P. Putnam's Sons, →ISBN
- To ascend (a building, a wall, etc.) using a ladder.
- The Rochdale climber spoken of once fell 70 feet from a mill at Linfitts, owing to an accident while he was laddering. He was terribly hurt, but recovered, and still carries on his trade with unshaken nerve.1896, Chambers's Journal, Edinburgh; London: W. & R. Chambers, →OCLC, page 367
- Of a knitted garment: to develop a ladder as a result of a broken thread.
- Oh damn it, I've laddered my tights!
- To close in on a target with successive salvos, increasing or decreasing the shot range as necessary.
- For eighteen minutes Revenge pounded the dockyard area at an average range of 15,700 yards, spreading for line and laddering for range to a prearranged plan to cover the whole target area.2007, Peter Smith, Naval Warfare in the English Channel: 1939-1945, page 134
- To corruptly coerce a convicted offender to admit to offences to be taken into consideration which they do not actually believe they committed, as a way to artificially increase the rate of solved crimes.
Forms of laddering
| plural | ladderings |
|---|
Questions about laddering
- What does laddering mean?
- Laddering means a process of soil compaction that serves to break up clods and level a field.
- What is laddering the present participle and gerund of?
- Laddering is the present participle and gerund of ladder.
- What part of speech is laddering?
- Laddering is a noun.
- What is the plural of laddering?
- The plural of laddering is ladderings.
Words near laddering in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: laddering (page history and authors); ladder (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “laddering.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/laddering. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.